b. 19 February 1955, Oakland, California, USA. Murray is regarded by many critics as the most important tenor saxophonist of his generation. While he was still an infant his family moved from the Oakland ghetto to integrated Berkeley. He learnt music from his mother, a church pianist, and took up the tenor saxophone at the age of nine, learning the fingering from his clarinet-playing older brother. Three years later he was leading R&B bands. On the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated he was asked, as president of the student body at his junior high school, to address his fellow students. He led the soul revue, the Notations Of Soul, in a two-hour session that helped to avert violence in response to Dr. King's murder. He continued formal study at Pomona College, Los Angeles, where he was taught by Stanley Crouch and Margaret Kohn. He and Crouch later worked together as part of Black Music Infinity and in Murray's 1975 Trio. It was with this unit that Murray relocated to New York, becoming involved with the loft circuit of experimental musicians. He linked up with three of these (Hamiet Bluiett, Oliver Lake, and Julius Hemphill) to form the World Saxophone Quartet in 1977.

Listen to David Murray at Finetune.

• (1987)  Hope Scope

• Thabo
• Lester (For Lester Young)
• Same Places New Faces
• Ben (For Ben Webster)
• Hope

• John Coltrane
• Eric Dolphy
• Rahsaan Roland Kirk
• Archie Shepp
• Dave Douglas
• Steve Lacy
• Cecil Taylor
• Ornette Coleman
• Charles Mingus
• Pharoah Sanders
• Albert Ayler
• Art Ensemble of Chicago
• Tony Williams
• Keith Jarrett
• Arthur Blythe
• Jack DeJohnette
• Myra Melford
• Don Byron
• Andrew Hill
• John Zorn

• ungawa
• pandoradead
• eddielin11
• burai
• tabascodenho
• wimank
• grandwazou